Sculptures of Buildings
The interest here for me is not to make architectural models, nor to give an architectural experience such as wall, enclosure, or looking through an aperture towards an inside or outwards to a vista. Rather, these are sculptures that use representations of buildings, generic forms to create a kind of tension between the way we view objects and the architectural space they inhabit.
Our perception of architecture is ambiguous, not least of all because of the mediation of photography, film, and transportation. On the street we know and can perceive buildings receding in space, diminishing as we look down the street or up several stories to the roofline. But we also experience buildings as looming over us; their size dominates our body scale. Looking through a viewfinder reminds us how distorted initial perception is and how the brain compensates to provide us with a coherent and unified experience.
These sculptures are constructed in digital space and are wilfully distorted: tapered, sheared, compressed. When they are embodied in material, it is as though they have their own “built-in” perspective, fixed and immutable as the objects they have become. This feature undermines our normal expectations of perspective as being an ever-changing adjustment between viewer and environment. There is a curious anamorphosis at work: there is a tendency for the spectator to adjust his/her position in relation to the object to remove the distortion, to find the correct position where the object looks as though its behaving according to the normal conventions of perspective.